The Nintendo Entertainment Thread

To avoid the risk of being lost in the vast sea of the WOYM thread, this is a thread for talking about various things Nintendo related.

Anyway... I looked online yesterday to see about the WiiU's ability to play Wii titles, as well as whether Gamecube titles are downloadable from the WiiU eShop, and was met with disappoint on two fronts.

First, if you want to transfer Wii VC purchases to WiiU, you won't be using the WiiU eShop, but rather the Wii Shop Channel on the WiiU's Wii emulator. This means your Wii VC games don't support the WiiU game pad (since the Wii emulator doesn't) as well your Wii VC title are eternally separated from WiiU eShop titles.
Second, the WiiU doesn't have a Gamecube controller port, which means it doesn't support Gamecube titles AT ALL. This despite the Wii supporting many of every past Nintendo console's games (via emulation).

The Wii used an emulator to play Gamecube games, but it was completely transparent. It seems that Nintendo really have half-assed their newest console in more ways than crappy marketing.

If they tied the games to a central account, how would they sell them to you again?

Also, wonky as Nintendo's backwards compatibility tends to be, it's about 100% more consistent than Microsoft or Sony (partial/discontinued support from last gen to current gen, no compatibility from current gen to next gen). Nintendo is basically the only company that seems to care about backwards compatibility at all this generation.

Nintendo has been remarkably consistent about supporting exactly one previous generation, and the reason they always seem to cut out the generation before that (DS supports GBA but not GBC, 3DS supports DS but not GBA, Wii U supports Wii but not GC) is because they tend to use full-on hardware emulation. Wii plays Gamecube games because it has Gamecube parts in it, and it effectively becomes a Gamecube when you use them, right down to not being able to turn the system back off with the Wii remote. I would guess that the Wii U has some actual Wii parts inside, and they left the Gamecube parts out to save space. Not joking.

It seems a bit stupid to bring Metroid as one of the NES Classics GBA game because later for the GBA, they remade the game and added more after Mother Brain and that was called Metroid Zero Mission

What if you didn't like Zero Mission?
What if you don't want to play through that just to play Metroid?
What if you want something as close to the NES version as possible including the manual etc. It's a collector's item.

On the subject of Gamecube BC, that is a console 2 generations old. Only console I know that does that is the PS3 and modern ones don't even do PS2 games, so that seems a bit unfair to judge Nintendo on.

The VC transfer stuff is bullcrap though, I hate rebooting the thing to access those, and then I have to pay again just to play it on the gamepad? Yeaaaahhhh no I won't be doing that Nintendo.

Like the fact that the Wii had Gamecube emulation in Gamecube mode, so does the Wii emulation run only in Wii mode. This also means that it runs with the very same Wii architecture and memory handling, allowing all games on Wii to be playable on the Wii U. However, this also means that Wii U capabilities cannot be accessed from within the Wii emulator.

I mean, it's kind of like running DOS in a DOS emulator on Windows. You can play DOS games, you can do all kinds of crazy DOS shit, but in the end, you cannot access Windows functionality within the DOS emulation.

Further more, they can't natively emulate Wii games on the Wii U because the Wii U most likely has a different architecture. I mean, think about it. Most Windows 95 games aren't supported anymore on Windows 8 because of the different way memory gets handled or whatever it is that prevents me from playing Gearheads or Game Maker 6 on Windows 8. You can't simply do it without having to make the consumer wait more, and it's not just one year more, it's several years more due to the fact that they have to make sure all functions run as they should, and even then they have to test each game out to see if it runs as perfectly as it previously did, and make patches in the cases it doesn't. They might as well just recompile the shit out of stuff and resell it instead.

Besides, if you already own the VC games on the Wii and the game comes out on Wii U, you get a decent discount.

Seriously people, if you're going to bitch about something, at least do some fricken research or put a little thought in it.